A Little Brilliance From My Good Friend Matt
Weather Bulletin - Denver
Up here, in the "Mile-High City," we just recovered from a Historic event --- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions"--- with a historic blizzard of up to 44 inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of communities and cut power to tens of thousands.
FYI:
George Bush did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV.
Our Mayor did not blame Bush or anyone else.
Our Governor did not blame Bush or anyone else, either.
CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX or NBC did not visit - or report on this category
5 snowstorm.[ed: except that it affected travel to LA and NY]
Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards.
No one asked for a FEMA Trailer House.
No one looted.
Nobody - I mean Nobody - demanded the government do something.
Nobody expected the government to do anything, either.
No Larry King, No Shepard Smith, No Oprah, No Chris Mathews and No Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.
No Sean Penn, No Barbra Streisand, No Hollywood types to be found.
Nope, we just melted the snow for water.
We sent out caravans of SUV's to pluck people out of snow engulfed cars.
The truck drivers pulled people out of snow banks and didn't ask for a penny.
Local restaurants made food and the police and fire departments delivered it to the snowbound families.
Families took in the stranded people - total strangers.
We fired up wood stoves, broke out coal oil lanterns or Coleman lanterns.
We put on extra layers of clothes because up here it is "Work or Die".
We did not wait for some affirmative action government to get us out of a mess created by being immobilized by a welfare program that trades votes for 'sittin at home' checks.
Even though a Category "5" blizzard of this scale has never fallen this early, we know it can happen and how to deal with it ourselves.
"In my many travels, I have noticed that once one gets north of about
48 degrees North Latitude, 90% of the world's social problems evaporates."
It does seem that way, at least to me.
I hope this gets passed on.
Maybe SOME people will get the message. The world does Not owe you a living.
Of course, Matt hits it square in the sweet spot. This is the essence of Reagan Conservatism: THE WORLD--THE U.S. GOVERNMENT--DOES NOT OWE YOU A THING!!
This, from Matt, finally crystalizes the real reason the GOP lost this Fall.
In the 80s, Reagan piled up huge deficits in service to one priority: end the threat of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union eventually did collapse, and in the process the size of government managed to shrink if you exclude the military. Reagan's message: we will protect you; most of the rest is really your deal.
In the 90s the GOP swept to power based on a very tight, fiscally conservative message: shrink government, including (sadly) the military in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. Hell, even the Democratic President announced that the era of big government was over. Newt Gingrich and the CWA insisted that the government operate on budget, and managed to reform one of the major entitlement programs in the process. Winning by telling people that they are responsible for themselves.
In this decade, the GOP--led by George W. Bush--has fallen back on Big Government in the guise of "compassionate Conservatism." The implicit message is that the government exists to solve your problems. And that worked in the shadows of 9/11. But when you combine telling people that the government will do for them, with the inescapable theme that the government will do for themselves first (by refusing to end benchmarks), you open yourself up to all kinds of attacks. When Iraq struggles to get on its feet, you look like you can't solve somebody else's problems; when Katrina gets bungled by local, state, and federal authorities, you look like you can't solve your own problems, either (if the federal government didn't exist to solve everybody's problems, then the blame would have more accurately been distributed among state and local authorities, as well.)
If the government exists to solve everybody's problems, and they can't pull it off, then the governing party must be incompetent, . . .
and they deserve to lose elections. | |
